1.    What is the effect of the prelude to THE BELLWETHER REVIVALS by beginning at the end of the book? What expectations are created by this projection into the future?

2.    What makes Oscar such a likable character --- both to the other characters in the novel and to us as readers? Why is he accepted into the “flock” despite its differences in class, education, and background? In what ways is Oscar the book’s moral center?

3.    What enables Oscar to fit into a social group that he had considered forever beyond his reach? Why does Oscar and Iris’s relationship work despite their differences in class and education?

4.    Why does the organ music pull Oscar into the church, even though he is an atheist? Does his meeting Iris there seem purely accidental or in some way fated? Is Eden right to suggest that he is responsible for Oscar and Iris’s romance?

5.    Eden Bellwether is a complex and fascinating character. How sympathetic or unsympathetic were you toward Eden at the beginning of the novel? At the end? When did your view of him begin to change?

6.    Oscar tells a Mrs. Bellwether, who wonders if her son is exceptional or abnormal: “I’m not sure it’s possible to be exceptional without being a bit abnormal too. Goes with the territory” [p. 309]. What does the novel contribute to the long–standing debate about the relation between genius and madness? Are the two necessarily inseparable?

7.    Benjamin Wood has a gift for particularly vivid metaphors. When Oscar listens to Eden at the organ, “It was music like gushing water, like frantic animals being herded on a hillside, like all the conversations in the world being spoken at once, like an ocean prising itself apart, like two great armies converging on each other” [p. 230]. What makes these metaphors so evocative? How do these metaphors, and many others like them throughout the novel, make the reading experience more imaginatively engaging?

8.    Do you agree with Dr. Crest that hope can be a dangerous delusion? Why does Crest himself arrive at that conclusion? How different do you think his revised book would have been from the earlier, pre–Eden edition that was published?

9.    What stops Oscar during his physical struggle with Eden? Does he make the right decision?

10.Oscar tries not to think too much about how he might have prevented the deaths at the end of the novel. Who is most responsible for not stopping Eden before he went completely mad? What might Oscar, Iris, and Dr. Crest have done differently? Should Eden’s father, Theo, have intervened? Or was some kind of tragedy inevitable?